Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT
34 comments
·January 15, 2025UmYeahNo
Terretta
Same experience except mine insisted I had no tasks.
It does say it's a beta on the label, but the thing inside doesn't seem to know that, nor what it's supposed to know. Your point 1, for sure.
Point 2 is a SaaS from before the LLMs+RAG beat normal things. Status page, a SaaS. API membership, metrics, and billing, a SaaS. These are all undifferentiated, but arguably they selected quite well for when the selections were made, and unless the help is going to sell more users, they shouldn't spend time on undifferentiated heavy lifting, arguably.
neom
I've thought about this a lot too and my guess is that because foundational modals take a lot to train, I don't think they are trained fairly often, and from my experiences you can't train in new data easily, so I think you'd have to have some little up to date side system, and I suspect they're very thoughtful about these "side systems" they place, from trying to build some agent orchestration stuff myself nothing ends up being as simple as as I expect with "side systems" and stuff easily goes off the rails. So my thought was probably, given the scale they're dealing with, this is probably a low priority not actually particularly easy feature.
yosito
I regularly use Perplexity and Cursor which can search the internet and documentation to answer questions that aren't in their training data. It doesn't seem that hard for ChatGPT to search and summarize their own docs when people ask about it.
neom
You would want a feature like "self aware" to be pretty canonical, not based on a web search, and even if they had a discreet internal side system it could query that you controlled, if the training data was a year old, how would you keep it matched from a systems point of view over time? Also it's unclear how the model would interoperate the data each time it ran on the new context. It seems like a pretty complicated system to build tbh, esp when maintaining human created help and docs and FAQs etc is A LOT simpler and more reliable source of truth. That said, my understanding is behind the scenes they are working towards the product we experience just built around the foundational model, not THE foundational model is it pretty much is today. Once they have a bunch of smaller llms that do discreet standard tasks set up, I would guess they will become considerably more "aware".
miltonlost
> So my thought was probably, given the scale they're dealing with, this is probably a low priority not actually particularly easy feature.
"working like OpenAI said it should" is a weird thing to put low priority. Why do they continuously put out features that break and bug? I'm tired of stochastic outputs and being told that we should accept sub-90% success rates.
At their scale, being less than 99.99% right results in thousands of problems. So their scale and the outsized impact of their statistical bugs is part of the issue.
neom
Why are you setting your bar this way? Is it because of how they do their feature releases (no warning of it being an alpha or beta feature)? Their product, ChatGPT was released 2 years ago, and is a fairly complicated product. My understanding was the whole thing is still a pretty early product generally. It doesn't seem unusual that any startup doing something as big as they are to release features that don't have all the kinks ironed out. I've released some kinda janky features to 100,000s of users before not totally knowing how it's going to preform with all of them at that scale, I don't think that is very controversial in product development.
Also, I was specifically talking about it being able to understand the features it has in my earlier comment, I don't think that is the same problem as the remind me feature not working consistently.
baxtr
Now imagine giving this "agent" a task like booking a table at a restaurant or similar.
"Yeah sure I got you a table at a nice restaurant. Don’t worry."
m3kw9
Buggy af right now, 95% tasks failed and I get a ton of emails about it
ProofHouse
Very, very, very buggy and really looks extremely low effort as with many OpenAI feature rollouts. Nothing wrong with an MVP feature, but make it at least do what it’s supposed to do and maybe give it 10% more extensibility than the bare bones.
ElijahLynn
Yeah, I saw the 4o with Tasks today, tried it and asked "what is 4o with Tasks", it had no idea. I had to set it to web search mode to figure it out.
headcanon
I'm trying to figure out how this would be useful with the existing feature set.
It seems like it would be good for summarizing daily updates against a search query. but all it would do is display them. I would probably want to connect it with some tools at minimum for it to be useful.
dgfitz
New killer feature: cron
Can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t pay $200/mo for even more features. Eventually I bet they can clean out /tmp!
DeepYogurt
They're really trying to juice the usage numbers
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B
As long as it’s generating hype and funding, it brings us closer to their own definition of AGI. It’s the perfect plan.
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amelius
Can I ask it to check for deals on products and make it search the web several times a day?
ProofHouse
Yeah, it’s pretty bad, embarrassingly so quite honestly. Literally a single developer in a day could probably significantly improve it. I’m sure that’s coming, but why don’t they just launch these MVP features at least a quarter baked. It’s essentially unusable as is. If it could ping me on my phone And advanced voice could open or I could go do a basic task, great I’m back to using it. But essentially as it is rolled out, it’s hilariously minimal and borderline unusable.
geor9e
sounds like theyre trying to get ahead of cron job wrappers so they dont get slammed at peak times
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kifler
Oddly enough, I do not have access to scheduled tasks either on the app or web interfaces and I am a paying customer.
delgaudm
It took me a minute to find it. It's a different model -- pull down the models list and you might see one with tasks.
ilaksh
This will be a lot more useful when it's able to combine with more tools, such as in custom GPT actions, APIs, "computer use", the Python interpreter, etc.
retskrad
OpenAI resembles the old Apple: ship the best experience. The ChatGPT app on every platform is the best in business and they are shipping polished features relatively quickly. It's quite the contrast to Apple of today, the world's largest company who is so inept that they are releasing Apple Intelligence, which is quite literally using ChatGPT 3.5 tech in 2025. It just shows how valuable CEO's like Altman, Musk and Jobs are to a corporation.
extr
The ChatGPT UI/UX is pretty middling. They still don't have a proper answer to Claude Projects, plus they are focusing on shipping stuff like this instead of fixing the numerous papercuts with the chat experience in their UI. How is it that I can access the most powerful AI on the planet with o1 pro, but if I paste more than few pages of text there's no solution for that, it just overflows the input box and makes it impossible to navigate?
Jimmc414
> They still don't have a proper answer to Claude Projects
They added Projects in December:
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/10169521-using-projects-...
throwaway314155
OpenAI projects don't work very well compared to Anthropic (which has its own limitations as is).
arghwhat
The "old" Apple certainly didn't ship anything quick or on the bleeding edge, nor did they ship the "best" experience. They did, however, have somewhat different priorities than their competitors. They still do to some extent.
TylerE
Apple Intelligence is running on device instead of racks and racks of cloud hardware. Of course it’s less sophisticated.
amelius
Yeah, but knowing that doesn't make it much better; it's the wrong design choice.
paul7986
Indeed which makes me excited for..
Open AI creating an AI phone with Microsoft ... release H.E.R. (the movie) in your pocket.
Your AI assistant / Agent is seen on the Lock Screen (like a FaceTime call UI/UX) waiting at your beckon to do everything for you /be there for via via text, voice, gestures, expressions, etc.
It interfaces with other AI Agents of businesses, companies, your doctor, friends & family to schedule things & used as a knowledge-base (ask friends birthday if they allow that info).
Apple is indeed stale & boring to me (heavy GPT user) in 2025.
I tried this yesterday, asking it to create a simple daily reminder task, which it happily did. Then when the time came and went I simply got a chat that the task failed, with no explanation of why or how it failed. When I asked it why, it hallucinated that I had too many tasks. (I only had the one) So, now I don't know why it failed or how to fix it. Which leads to two related observations:
1) I find it interesting that the LLM rarely seems trained to understand it's own features, or about your account, or how the LLM works. Seems strange that it has no idea about it's own support.
2) Which leads me to the Open AI support docs[0]. It seems pretty telling to me that they use old-school search and not an LLM for its own help docs, right?
[0] https://help.openai.com/